Friday 12 September 2008

Implied Commission

So here’s the thing. At the end of a profitable week, we not unreasonably want to know where we stand with regard to the Premium Charge.

To calculate what this charge will be, we need to know our Commssion Generated total, which as I understand it, is half of our Commission Paid + Implied Commission.

However, we have no way of precisely knowing our Implied Commission. The best we can do is approximate this sum by going through all our losing bets, but for an active trader, this is not an insignificant effort.

Our Account Statement shows Commission Paid on our winning bets, but does not show Implied Commission on our losing bets.

It does seem strange to me that this charging method would be legal. Can anyone name another financial transaction that you would commit to without knowing what your fees, taxes, charges, commission etc. would be? I can’t. I buy stocks or commodities and I know what my charges will be.

I’m not suggesting that Betfair would make up these numbers, but there is a certain lack of transparency here that, quite frankly, stinks.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

your right - betfair could just make up any number and you would be none the wiser.i would like to keep track of everything to know if i was eligible for the premium charge.what i dont understand about the premium charge is this - for every bet matched betfair makes a profit - so what difference does it make if
somebody does really well ?